Songhai Breaks Free of Mali
The Songhai broke from Mali around 1430, and within sixty years had built the largest empire West Africa ever saw. Mali had dominated the Niger bend since the thirteenth century, and Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 — with a caravan that spent enough gold in Cairo to depress the price for a decade — is what put it on European maps. It was in decline by the fifteenth century. Succession disputes, the loss of the salt trade at Taghaza, and pressure from Tuareg in the north and Mossi in the south had loosened its hold on the eastern provinces. Gao, on the Niger downstream from Timbuktu, was the Songhai centre, and its rulers stopped remitting tribute. Sunni Ali Ber, who took power around 1464, made it an empire. He built a river fleet on the Niger, which is what let him move and supply armies across a region with almost no roads, and took Timbuktu in 1468 and Djenné in 1473 after a siege of years. He was hostile to the scholarly establishment of Timbuktu and killed or exiled a large number of them, which is why the chronicles written by their successors describe him as a tyrant and a nominal Muslim. Askia Muhammad took the throne in 1493 and reversed that entirely, patronising the scholars, making the pilgrimage, and organising the administration into provinces. Songhai controlled the gold and salt routes and a territory larger than western Europe. A Moroccan army with firearms destroyed it at Tondibi in 1591.
- Year: 1430 CE
- Category: Political
